When They First Saw the Stars
by paired discontinuity
Summary: Each of them was thinking something a little different when they saw the sky change.
1. Hei

**_A/N_**: _Hi again! New fandom for our collab – though it's one we've both tinkered with before. So many fandoms we share. :)_

_We're writing this for the Diversity Challenge at the Anime and Manga Fanfiction Challenges Forum, prompt B10 – a drabble collection with drabbles under 200 words. We're alternating drabbles with this, so I (Remi) am doing the first one, Aiko is doing the second and so on._

_Enjoy!_

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**When They First Saw the Stars  
1\. Hei**

He looked for them even after they had vanished.

Maybe it was just wistful thinking that made him drag that telescope to the park – and then later, to all corners of the world. America and Japan and Russia and so many other places besides. Some he didn't remember anymore. Most he didn't need to remember.

The old stars…he didn't need to remember those either. When the new sky had appeared, he hadn't been on it. He hadn't been tethered to a star.

Or, really, he'd always been tethered by a star. _Her_ star. Xing's. Bai's.

Fate had even given her the name of "star".

And now it was his. Her power. Her star. Her dreams, whatever they had been before the old stars vanished and new ones reappeared.

They'd been young then. They hadn't thought the world would vanish before they could even make their dreams, and give words to them.

So he looked. As though the past would speak now to his present self, and tell him what dreams she – they – had lost.


	2. Amber

_**A/N: **__Oh look, it's up. Hooray!_

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2\. Amber

_Oh, so that's what it's like._

In the beginning, before the new sky, Amber had only known the stars as stars. They were integral to the universe, born before humans and dying after so many had already lived and died. They were immortal to the mortals. They wouldn't be gone until the world was long dead.

Once they fell, she realized that they were as mortal as she or the others, or anyone. Humans were like the stars.

She wondered if the further forward she saw, the further back she went, the more she would see the old sky, or if she would see it at all. But she didn't have time left for that, did she?

All she had time for was to watch and see what could be. She was old enough to know what would happen, give or take details. So she would puzzle it out, and like the stars that had fallen and crashed onto their planet, she would act.

She would go out before anyone noticed, but the resonating fire would scar the sky long after she was gone.


	3. Yin

**A/N:** _Number three for a new years appearance! Enjoy_!

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**3\. Yin**

She'd never seen the stars, but something in the air told her things had changed.

It wasn't just the screams that followed like an echo. It wasn't the lack of a piano under her fingertips, or the lack of tears in her eyes when her hands were clasped in prayer, or the lack of something meaningful in her memories, the memories that began to slip away and replace themselves with other things: not the air, but water, under fingers, her toes, in the cavities of her ears and upon the screen of her brain.

She couldn't see the sky, but she saw the water: a brilliant blue, formless and shapeless until it shaped under her, and she bid it look inside her heart lest there be something she should cling to while her old self slipped away. There wasn't. Water flowed in and out. It cleansed her. Emptied her. Became her eyes - eyes she'd never known.

And she tilted those eyes up one day and saw the stars. They looked pretty, she thought, and they made her feel a soft something too: some meaning. She couldn't say what, or why, because she'd never seen the old stars before.


	4. Misaki

4\. Misaki

The stars are no longer her guiding lights.

They aren't the myths and legends her mother told to put her to sleep. They are not the northern star to help the wayward traveler find his path forward. They are the constellations of the cursed.

When they fell, they marked. The mark was invisible to anyone who wasn't looking. Even for her, who had seen the stars fall, who had seen the gate rise, the mark was hard to find.

Criminals were so much more difficult now. She almost wished she had been touched by a fallen star, if only to see the world as they do. It would make her job easier.

Then she would remember otherwise, and think of the shadows in the fine print of the contract. Think of the remuneration that doesn't make any sense dragging her down, of the obsession with humanity overlapping her obsession with cutting out the root, and decided against it.

It's not as though she can decide what stars fall where, or her grand place in them.


End file.
